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The Douglases are Borderers and Lothian - not really Highland at all. Of course they date way back into Scottish history and are a great family in their own right. But they're south of the "Highland Line". When the clan system ended at Culloden in 1746, there were really only 30 or so actual "clans" - that is to say people living in the Highlands who lived under the rule of a feudal chief and claimed kinship (or adopted kinship - hence "septs") with the chief.

Really the whole modern sept thing is a result of the Great Tartan Nonsense (as author Clifford Hanley calls it) that began with George IV's state visit to Edinburgh in the 1820s, and continued under Queen Victoria and her friendship with the goofy Sobieski Stuarts. The canny Scots woolen manufacturers were happy to ride on the wave and find a clan name and tartan for EVERYBODY. Many Lowland and Border families suddenly became "clans" and even more surnames were gathered under clan names as "septs" so that you could buy your very own sett of MacWhoever tartan.

But before the Great Tartan Nonsense, the great Border families would have laughed themselves silly if anybody called them a "clan". Highlanders were considered to be dirty, unlettered savages who spoke a weird unwritten language and stole everybody blind. If you read the 16th c. Scots poets (a quick cheat is to read C.S. Lewis's masterful volume of the Oxford History of English Literature), the Highlander was the butt of the Polack jokes of the time, except he was thieving and murderous as well as ignorant and dirty. As one Lowlander remarked to somebody who asked if his family had a tartan, "No. Thank God my family could always afford to wear trousers!"

Ayrshire is very definitely Lowlands - home of Robert Burns, who never wore tartan in his life probably and certainly never a kilt. They were respectable trousered farmers who spoke broad Scots, not Gaelic. And there is no chief of Clan Douglas, because the title is extinct and was granted to the Hamiltons, who cannot use it because their surname isn't Douglas!

BUT - my advice is, if you like the Douglas crest (it's a pretty one - a salamander in flames, with the motto "Jamais arriere" - "never behind") or the Douglas tartan, and there are several attractive ones to choose from, have at it! It does no harm, everybody has a good time, and there's no real objection to it. Especially since there IS no chief of Clan Douglas, so you're not stealing anybody's crest!

We do it too -- my husband's father's mother has a Scottish surname and her family really is from Scotland, but the tartan is ugly as homemade sin and my husband is a very large man, so although his mother is Irish her surname is listed as a sept of the Gordons, so my husband wears hunting Gordon tartan for day wear and Dress Gordon for evening wear -- which is a douce respectable dark green and blue that is a little less shocking than 6'6" of the hideous orange-and-slime-green Dunbar sett would be.

And I just don't like the MacGregor tartan, too gaudy, so I wear MacKay, which sounds like a family name although we're actually no relation.

Thanks for the interesting explanation re Scotts. I am writing a book on early American serial/spree murderers call the Harpe brothers. They apparently came from “Covenentors”. I don’t know if this would be Highlanders or Lowlanders. But they were not the Scots/Irish. People who moved to Ireland from Scotland and thence to the US. At any rate the Covenentors were “loyalists” who fought for the Crown against the “patriots” who fought the American Revolution. The Harpe brothers were said to have ridden with “bloody” Banastre Tarelton and fought the patriots including many Scots/Irish “overmountain boys” at Cowpens and Kings Mountain. I was told that Harper was a varient of Harpe.

My husband considered himself to be almost pure Scottish until his mother told him a French Canadian trapper had married a Cree Indian woman which made him 1/16th Indian. She had hidden this fact for many years because of prejudice against Indians in the mid West. He had very light blue eyes, red hair, very ruddy skin that burned easily, pronounced brow ridges, a long torso, and short legs. He though there was Viking ancestry. After reading some of the other GGG posts, I suspect he had Neanderthal genes. He had a warrior temperment. The paternal line’s name was Aikin. His mother’s line was Carleton, which I have traced back to the late 1700’s in Kentucky and then a move to southern Illinois Do you have any information?